By Isaac Christopher Lubogo
Subtitle: When National Budgets Are Read Aloud but Not Lived By the People
1. Budget Reading as Ritual: What Lies Behind the Numbers
On 13th June 2025, Uganda is expected to table a UGX 72.1 trillion budget for FY2025/2026, representing a sharp increase from UGX 52.7 trillion the previous year. On paper, this increase seems progressive.
But the reality for the majority of Ugandans—over 8 in every 10 working in the informal sector—is that these numbers often exist in isolation from lived experiences.
The ordinary person is more concerned about the cost of sugar, rent, school fees, and fuel than macroeconomic figures.
The budget, though read with ceremony in Parliament, is too often felt only as an aftershock—when fuel prices rise, when market taxes increase, or when services fail.
2. The Hopeful Commitments: What Could Work if Done Right
To its credit, the budget makes ambitious commitments that, if properly implemented, could benefit everyday people.
The Parish Development Model (PDM) continues to be funded, with UGX 1 trillion allocated for disbursement to over 10,000 parishes.
In principle, this supports small farmers, women groups, and micro-cooperatives.
In Bugiri, for example, tomato growers could receive capital to buy better seedlings or irrigation kits. Similarly, TVET education has been allocated an 18% funding increase, targeting 60,000 youth for skilling in carpentry, mechanics, and ICT.
If transparent and demand-driven, this could uplift jobless youth in Kawempe, Gulu, and Mbarara, offering them a dignified route to self-employment.
Further still, digitization of government services under URA, NIRA, and EPSAuto is expected to reduce corruption, eliminate middlemen, and widen service access.
3. The Burdens We Cannot Ignore: The Growing Cost of Debt and Survival
Yet alongside these promises lies a heavy, undeniable weight. Uganda will spend over UGX 19 trillion—26.3% of the total budget—on debt repayment.
With the national debt crossing UGX 96 trillion, every ordinary citizen is now indirectly taxed for money they never received.
That primary teacher in Luuka who hasn’t been paid in two months is underpaid because Uganda is servicing loans used for incomplete roads or inflated procurement contracts.
The patient in Soroti Hospital who dies due to lack of oxygen is part of the invisible cost of debt prioritization.
The child in a UPE school in Bundibugyo, sharing one textbook with four classmates, pays the price for mismanaged loans that built political empires—not schools.
4. The Cost of Living: The Budget That Taxes Survival
Fuel, food, and mobile money—three essentials in Ugandan life—are projected to become more expensive.
Excise duty on fuel is expected to rise by UGX 300 per litre, pushing transport and market prices upwards.
URA will continue enforcing the 0.5% tax on mobile money withdrawals, which hits the market woman in Lira, the single mother in Kiboga, and the school fees payer in Kisoro.
A boda boda rider in Kisenyi now spends UGX 5,000 more daily just on fuel. Transport from Mityana to Kampala has risen from UGX 7,000 to UGX 10,000, and matooke prices have jumped 23% in major markets, purely due to logistics costs. The budget is balanced on the backs of the poor.
5. The Service Delivery Mirage: Money Disbursed, Services Denied
Budget allocations often suggest progress, but delivery tells a different story.
The Auditor General’s 2024 report flagged over UGX 4.7 trillion in unaccounted-for funds across ministries.
That amount alone could revamp regional hospitals or clear salary arrears for teachers and nurses.
Yet, health centers in Kitgum lack gloves, rural schools in Kibaale have one teacher for three classes, and youth SACCOs in Mpigi have become political conduits. More money does not mean more services—it often just means more losses. State House and security sectors are expected to receive over UGX 6.1 trillion—larger than combined allocations for health and education. This is a budget for power retention, not people’s resilience.
6. Who Benefits from This Budget? Certainly Not the Ordinary Ugandan
Despite the slogans of “inclusive growth” and “leaving no one behind,” the budget continues to privilege the elite.
Development corridors focus on oil regions and political strongholds; contracts go to connected entities; resource allocation favors urban administrative comfort over rural poverty alleviation.
In Yumbe, Nakasongola, or Namisindwa, the story is the same: unmaintained feeder roads, no electricity, no clean water.
Meanwhile, banks prefer lending to government via treasury bills than supporting local businesses, which kills SMEs, stifles innovation, and swells youth joblessness. Over 2.1 million Ugandans remain unemployed, and the rest are underemployed, doing “kubatisa”—struggling silently under the disguise of formality.
7. A Moral Budget? Or a Ritual of Economic Inequality?
At its core, this budget reveals the moral character of the state.
Budgets are not just financial statements; they are expressions of what a government stands for.
If nearly a third of national revenue is used for debt, while children die of preventable diseases, then we are not budgeting for development—we are budgeting for elite comfort and systemic negligence.
If State House receives record allocations and hospitals remain unfunded, then we have built a palace in the middle of a slum.
The market vendor in Kasese, the farmer in Kachumbala, the teacher in Tororo, and the graduate in Ntinda all ask the same thing: where is the Uganda they are budgeting for?
8. Conclusion: What Must Be Done?
Uganda does not need more impressive budgets. It needs a budget that works—for the teacher, the market vendor, the health worker, and the unemployed graduate.
We must reframe national planning to prioritize equity, integrity, and execution.
Parliament should no longer clap for figures—they should ask who will feel them? Civil society must track not just allocations but actual impact. Citizens must begin demanding not promises, but performance.
Until this happens, Uganda’s budget will remain what it has become—a financial ritual recited for cameras, but largely irrelevant to the people it claims to serve.
A national moment that reads like a dream, but lives like a debt.
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